Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay in 2006

Guy Gavriel Kay (born November 7, 1954) is a Canadian writer of fantasy fiction.

Quotes

Tigana (1990)

All page numbers are from the mass market paperback edition published by Roc ISBN 0-451-45115-5

Nominated for the 1991 World Fantasy Award.

• When power is gone the memory of power lingers.
  • Part 1 “A Blade in the Soul”, Chapter 1 (p. 9)

• I suppose being right will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 14)

• Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 77)

• A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once...We can never truly know the path we have not walked.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 79)

• “The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.” He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. “Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.”
  • Part 2 “Dianora”, Chapter 7 (p. 184)

• Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.
  • Chapter 8 (p. 225)

• There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.
  • Part 3 “Ember to Ember”, Chapter 10 (p. 317)

• He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.
  • Part 4 “The Price of Blood”, Chapter 14 (p. 443)

• Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.
  • Chapter 15 (p. 461)

• It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth.
  • Part 5, “The Memory of a Flame”, Chapter 17 (p. 541)

• Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 561)

• In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 613)

Ysabel (2007)

All page numbers are from the hardcover first edition published by Roc ISBN 978-0-451-46129-2, 2nd printing

Won the 2008 World Fantasy Award

Italics as in the book

• But knowledge, however you got it, changed things, Ned Marriner thought. You couldn’t go back to not knowing, even if you wanted to.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 67)

• “But why would they attack us? What have you been doing here, Ned?”
  “Why would who attack us?”
  “Wolves.”
  “What? No way. Wolves are mostly vegetarian. I learned that in school last year.”
  “Then tell these to go find the salad bar,” said Aunt Kim, grimly.
  • Chapter 6 (p. 105)

• We’ll fall off that bridge when we cross it.
  • Chapter 10 (p. 201)

• Ned found that if he thought about things like that too much, the accident of it all, his mind started down unsettling paths.…
  Could you make a pattern out of any of this? Stitch together the seeming randomness into something that had meaning? Is that what life was about, he wondered: trying to make that pattern, to have things make sense?
  • Chapter 13 (p. 265; ellipsis represents elision of a list of happenstances)

• “Sometimes the blind to do with the blind.”
  “Yeah,” said Ned. “Straight over cliffs.”
  • Chapter 16 (p. 331)

• Sunrise, the first gift in the world. Promise and healing after the hard transit of night. After a darkness beset with beasts—imagined and real—and inner fears, and untamed, violent men. After sightlessness that could lead one astray into ditch or bog or over a cliff, or into the clutch and sway of whatever spirits might be a broad, bent on malice.
  Morning’s pale light had offered an end to such fears for centuries, millennia, whatever dangers might come with the day. Shutters were banged open, curtains drawn, shop doors and windows were unlocked, city gates unbarred, swung wide, as men and women made their way out into the offered day.
  On the other hand (in life there was almost always another hand), daylight meant that intimacy, privacy, escape from the unwanted gaze, silence for meditation, the solace of unseen tears on a pillow—or of secret love on that same pillow before, or after—were so much harder to claim. Rarer coinage, in the clear light.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 349)

• His choice here, no one else to blame. Sometimes, he thought, life was easier when you had people to stop you. Maybe that was something parents were good for.
  • Chapter 17 (p. 365)